Pass the Fava Beans: A New Book on Cannibalism Says It’s Not as Rare as We Once Thought

At a time when discussions of politics threaten to break out at any dinner party, a new book by the American Museum of Natural History researcher Bill Schutt provides a topic of conversation that might prove less disturbing: cannibalism.

Next time you eat Chinese, for example, you might discuss how, during the Yuan dynasty, royalty and upper-class citizens did so, too. So frequently did high society dine on fellow citizens that the various methods of preparing human flesh — including baking, roasting, broiling, smoke-drying and sun-drying — filled 13 pages of one book Schutt consulted. (Children were considered the tastiest, followed by women and last, men.) In fact, so-called epicurean cannibalism — that is, eating your fellow men/women/children because they taste good and not just because there’s nothing else in the house — was still widespread in China into the late 1960s during the Cultural Revolution.

“Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History” is full of such surprising news. Early in its pages we learn that almost everybody does it: not just in China, or the Donner party, or the New Guinea highlanders whose practice of eating the brains of dead relatives spread the deadly neurological disease kuru (though there’s plenty on these examples, too, in the book). Europeans, we read, “routinely consumed human blood, bones, skin, guts and body parts” for hundreds of years. Cannibalism, in fact, is not that unusual. It happens not only when people are starving or overcrowded. And it’s not restricted to humans.

In the natural world, strangers eat strangers, parents eat their children, children eat their parents and siblings eat each other — and they do it a lot. Baby black lace-weaver spiderlings cannibalize their mothers. The larvae of the elephant mosquito eat their fellow larvae and pupae. Among invertebrates — and 95 percent of animal life on earth, from insects to octopuses, belong to this group of spineless creatures — cannibalism is often the rule, not the exception.

Though it’s less common, “cannibalism occurs in every class of vertebrates, from fish to mammals,” the affable Schutt reveals, offering one fascinating and bizarre example after another. Sand tiger sharks get down to noshing on one another before they are even born, eating their siblings in utero. If that seems a tender time to consume one’s conspecific, consider the banana slug, a species that may begin chewing off critical bits of a mate while they are having sex. These gastropods sometimes become so entwined during mating that in an effort to disengage, “penises are slurped down spaghetti-style, occasionally by their owners. Although this usually puts an end to the festivities, the fact that the penises do not grow back presents fewer problems than one would expect,” the author informs us cheerfully. Since the slugs are hermaphrodites, they can just carry on as females.

“Cannibalism” is a jolly book, written in a breezy style, but the research behind it is impressive. A biologist with a specialty in the anatomy, evolution and behavior of bats, Schutt draws on scholarly journals and ancient texts, interviews biologists and anthropologists, and ventures into the field himself. Page 1 finds him wading in a temporary pool of rainwater and cow manure in Arizona in search of cannibal tadpoles. In a later chapter, he flies from New York to Dallas to eat a human placenta. (His hostess, who had given birth to no fewer than 10 children, offers him one of her spares.)

You might think a book on cannibalism would be upsetting, but this one’s not. It’s refreshing. “Cannibalism,” in fact, restores my faith in humanity: It’s good to know that, as regards this particular behavior, at least, people are no more horrifying than, or as splendidly surprising as, any other species out there.

Sy Montgomery is the author of “The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration Into the Wonder of Consciousness,” published in paperback last April.